Reader Comments (25)

Second panel is a delight!

In the "slog to the foregone conclusion competition" Monopoly gets the gold over its perennial closest rival, Risk. I don't know what game gets the bronze...

Woo hoo, the new book came today! What a great surprise- I thought it was postponed, since I didn't ask for any rush, so this is a real treat. At least for me- my Everloving Spouse evicted me from bed due to Excessive Chortling...

The moon men playing Monopoly would be awesome. "It's not your fault he acquired all the orange properties early, Sire. You prolonged his incarceration as long as you could with your strategy of losing by attrition."

I'm pretty sure Monopoly is a tool of some evil scientist who found a way to harness frustration and the destruction of friendships as an energy source. Then again, that could just be me hoping that nothing in the world could accidentally be so aggravating.

Any game where someone has a sufficiently large lead is a foregone conclusion, it's just not necessarily as drawn out as Monopoly. If you're winning 119-73 in cribbage, you're going to win on the next hand. If you're up 200 points in Scrabble and 3/4 of the bag including all or almost all of the big scoring tiles are gone, you're going to win.

I'd give the bronze for a slow loss to the basic version of Settlers of Catan when you are playing many people (4 regular, 6 expansion) and are boxed in to a little corner of the board and can't expand anywhere because everyone has you over a barrel when it comes to trading.

Ah, Risk brings back fond memories of Pizza King peperoni pizza, Pespi out of 16oz returnable glass bottles and watching my dad and uncles get into fights over who should have attacked whom. The game was eventually banned by my grandmother.

My understanding is that Monopoly was invented as an illustration of weaknesses in the capitalist system. According to wikipedia, "it was intended to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)

So the way that "winner" and "loser" is chosen randomly towards the start of the game, and then there is a tedious and hopeless endgame lasting hours, is a feature and not a bug. It parallels how as capital concentrates in the hands of the lucky, a capitalist economy ceases to be a level playing field. Over a tedious and hopeless endgame, you wind up with hereditary haves and have-nots.

I have heard that the idea that this would be a hugely successful game for children took the woman who invented it quite by surprise.

AC, I miss those bottles and rail against the loss of them on a frequent basis, as every member of my family will attest. Pepsi just isn't as good in any other container. Glass didn't impact the flavor and kept it cold longer.

The British version of Monopoly was partly designed by Mullet Boss's great-grandfather. The boss just got his secretary, who nothing at all about Britain, to pick some nice names while she was in London for a few hours. Thus the value of the properties bears almost no relation to what the real London streets are worth. Therefore the Moon Emperor would be ill-advised to base his economic takeover of the UK on Monopoly. Meaning that he probably will.

At least Monopoly isn't as evil as Diplomacy, which is the only board game that actively encourages immorality in the form of lying, backstabbing, and general deceitfulness, which are all pretty much required if you expect to win. Seriously, I'd let my kid play that bizzaro version of Dungeons and Dragons from 80's after-school-specials before letting them play Diplomacy.